Tecumseh Valley – Townes Van Zandt – chosen by Dara Higgins
The name she gave, was Caroline. One assumes she was telling the truth. She’d come down from Spencer, looking for work. That’s fair enough. By the end of some months of gruelling labour tending bar for Gypsy Sally it appears she’s finally saved enough to get back to Spencer, (thus raising the question, why didn’t she just stay there in the first place?) only to find out, via word come down, that her Paw had died.
Of course, it wasn’t going to be a tune about work in the depression era dustbowl, or how folk will do what they need to do to make ends meet, even if that requires leaving Paw in Spencer to come work in the buzzing metropolis that is Tecumseh Valley. It’s not about the tired pride one finds in one self at the end of another day of backbreaking labour. No, it’s a Townes Van Zandt song, so what happens next is pretty standard. She turns to drinking, and whoring, until she finds her own, dissolute demise amid the detritus of a local gutter. In Townes-land the simplest premise must all ways end with prison, addiction, disease or death. That’s the moral here, try as you might you’re railing against the inevitable, relentless brutality of life. The best laid plans of mice and men, etc. Townes himself railed against it all for a while, before checking out aged a mere 52, after years of alcohol abuse and heroin addiction, depression, unfulfilled potential and the rest. It’s clear that Caroline didn’t stand a chance from the second her name was uttered.
